


Soul Reaver: A Summary

by vailkagami



Series: Completely Accurate Legacy of Kain Summaries [2]
Category: Legacy of Kain
Genre: Completely accurate, Not a Story, Summary, as in, everyone's kind of an asshole
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-04-11
Updated: 2020-04-11
Packaged: 2021-03-01 16:54:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,818
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23600383
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vailkagami/pseuds/vailkagami
Summary: Following the summary of Blood Omen 1, here is an equally accurate and serious summary of the Soul Reaver games.An epic story of murder, revenge, tasty, tasty souls and block puzzles.
Series: Completely Accurate Legacy of Kain Summaries [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1698742
Kudos: 4





	Soul Reaver: A Summary

When we last left the beautiful if corroded land of Nosgoth, Kain had just seized power by refusing to suicide out of it and kind of becoming overlord by default. It is now, like, 15 centuries later and Kain has gone from white to green-ish in loving memory of Vorador whose execution he watched without much of a fuck to give, and also horns as a sort of perma-crown, because no one would ever possibly dethrone him.

His throne, by the way, is still on the collapsed pillars, but it is now surrounded by an actual building, which was an oddly sensible decision on his part. The building is called the Sanctuary of the Clans, and the clans are formed by his vampiric descendants and their respective broods.

While there are plenty of vampires around now, as opposed to one vampire at the fall of the pillars, Kain himself only made six of them because he ran out of juice after four or five of them and only made the last ones to complete the set. Those six are now ruling Nosgoth at his side and have been for a thousand years when Raziel, his first-born and right hand man, unexpectedly sprouts wings and promptly has them ripped out by Kain who then, adding insult to a lot of injury, proceeds to have him thrown into a lake. By his brethren. Who either didn’t like him very much or just saw Kain unceremoniously off his indisputable favorite and didn’t feel like starting a discussion.

So Raziel gets tossed into the Lake of the Dead, which is something they usually did to traitors or weaklings, presumably because Kain was jealous of the nifty bat-wings or just bored and felt like it. Once you reach a certain level of power, you no longer need to explain your motivation s .

Raziel doesn’t seem to care much for the reasons anyway, as no reason could be good enough for this, so he’s mostly just pissed. And in agony, as he spends the next several centuries sinking towards to presumably non-existing bottom of the lake through water that is still like acid for vampires and loses his skin in the process. And his jaw. And his internal organs. And any affection he might once have had for Kain.

What he does not lose are these things: a) His righteous indignation and b) his clan banner, which joins him at the bottom and serves as his scarf and main article of clothing after death.

For he is indeed dead when the pain recedes, as you tend to be after a centuries-long acid bath. A giant squid greets him upon waking, telling him to rejoice for he has been resurrected, but Raziel doesn’t feel like rejoicing and would rather fade to oblivion than run around as a tattered corpse, thank you very much. The choice is not his, however; resurrected he was and resurrected he remains. The Elder God, aka the giant squid, informs him that after his execution, Kain just kind of let the kingdom fall to ruin as the land is wrecked by cataclysms and the few remaining humans end up as food and/or are resurrected as even more vampires. This, according to the squid, is bad for balance, as the wheel of fate, of birth and death and rebirth, can no longer spin for lack of fuel. It is now Raziel’s noble purpose to kill Kain and his lieutenants and end the vampire plague so that all the souls can be cleansed and the world can be restored. And Raziel, never bothering to read the fine print, is like

“Dude, you had me at murder.”

Because Raziel is not as into gratuitous killing as Kain was, but he is very much into gratuitously killing Kain, and his treacherous brothers while he’s at it. So he ventures forth until he runs out of stream literally five steps later. Turns out dying for half an eternity and then getting resurrected is exhausting, but he can’t just slurp some blood to restore his strength because there is no blood to be slurped and he also doesn’t want any. What he wants is souls, as the squid informs him, and the underworld he is now trapped in is full of those. And they get slurped, and they are delicious indeed – delicious enough to get Raziel breathing heavily, without lungs.

Or air.

As it turns out, the lights are so squiggly in these underground caverns because they are underwater, which doesn’t really make any difference in the spectral realm, where time doesn’t pass and water doesn’t bother with much of anything. Once Raziel is out of it, though, the squid provides him with a portal to the material realm and he continues to make his way to the sanctuary of the clans, to kick some Kain-butt. His devious revenge plan is foiled, however, by Kain having locked the door.

Bugger.

So he has to take a detour, past the Lake of the Dead for happy memories and through his former clan territory, which is now deserted and all his descendants were wiped off the face of the world like excrement off a boot. This does not improve Raziel’s mood. There are also a few mutated vampires hanging out that suck blood through a straw and are the children of his brother Dumah, scavenging through the decaying land. Until Raziel murders them and eats their souls.

There are also vampire hunters who are mostly confused by Raziel and may or may not be left alone. And finally, next to Raziel’s realm the territory of his brother Melchiah, who was the runt of the litter which in this case means his immortal body kept decaying and he kept dressing in the skins of his victims even in Raziel’s time, just because Kain was greedy and didn’t know when to stop.

His children aren’t much better, being more zombie than vampire. They are recruited from random corpses in random cemeteries, are weak to even Nosgoth’s barely existing sun and like to burrow underground, which makes them also really, really annoying.

There is another fiend waiting for Raziel in the wasteland left behind by Kain’s greed and corruption, however: Block puzzles. There are block puzzles to solve to get into Melchiah’s territory. There are block puzzles to solve to get through Melchiah’s territory. There are block puzzles to solve to get out of Melchiah’s territory. Also, there is Melchiah, who is sitting in the basement covered in too many limbs and looking like a sentient mop with too many limbs and teeth and he confirms that all of Raziel’s decendants have been wiped out and that Kain just stopped giving any kind of fuck at all. About anything. So did Melchiah, because after a bit of chasing around and the discovery that Melchiah is unpleasantly present on both the physical and the spectral realm, Raziel ends up stuffing him into his own meat grinder and Melchiah is pretty okay with that.

Then Raziel eats his soul. As he does.

Afterwards, Raziel feels vaguely bad about that, but he also got a nice new ability from the fratricide, so there’s that. He can now pass through bars on the spectral realm, which is still a step behind his little brother, who could pass through bars in the material realm, but then Raziel also doesn’t look like a sentient mop with too many limbs and he wasn’t stuffed into his own meat grinder, so all in all he still comes out on top in the comparison.

He now uses his shiny new skill to finally enter the Sanctuary of the Clans, where Kain is waiting for him – impatient, but unwilling to step outside where he is reachable because the crumbled pillars just make for such a nice backdrop for a fight.

And a fight is what they are having. First they snap at each other, where Raziel is like

“You murdered me and you murdered my clan and also you kinda destroyed the world back in the day which I now see was a Bad Thing, and if I were in your position I would be less of an asshole.”

And Kain is like

“LOL, whatever.”

Because being an asshole is what he does, everything sucks anyway and the world is beyond saving and their empire has become obsolete and also a wasteland full of degenerate mutant vampire zombies, and so Kain and Raziel swap at each other until Kain smashes the Soul Reaver over Raziel’s head, which surprisingly enough results in a draw.

As it turns out, the head is mightier than the sword, which breaks. Again. Raziel also kind of breaks, but that only means he slips into the spectral realm, and Kain disappears from his sight while, after losing his favorite weapon of countless centuries, giving the smug impression of having done A Really Good Job™. Raziel, meanwhile, finds that not only people have ghosts that end up on the spectral realm upon death, but swords do too. Or at least this one does. Its spirit is waiting for him on the other side, and rather than eat it, as he does, Raziel, never bothering to read the fine print, decides to pick it up and the sword decides that as a replacement for its physical form he’ll do just fine and just kind of attaches itself to his arm. While the giant squid talks about destiny  from the off and how  Raziel will no w never, ever, ever get rid of the thing again.

Another inhabitant of the spectral realm ch o oses this moment to make a dramatic entry: Ariel, long dead balance guardian and Disliker of Kain, who mutters a bit about the cruelty of time before offering Raziel her council. And Raziel, who lived for a millennium with nothing but Kain’s tales of his adventures for entertainment, somehow missed the part where Ariel’s council is something to be taken with a hint of caution.

Or maybe he just prefers it over the council of the giant squid, because even before there were other options available he had to suspect that giant octopodes bitching beneath lakes are just not the most trustworthy of advisors. Or he ignores the history lesson on account of Ariel’s hints being so fucking vague that she might as well have not said anything at all.

So he takes her vague-ass directions and his shiny new wraith blade over to the lair of his brother Zephon, which is located in the empty shell of a human cathedral and locked with a door that can only be opened with the Soul Reaver, the weapon Kain just happily smashed to pieces, which just about shows how much Kain values this particular son and his weird, weird offsprings.

For they are weird indeed, having gone the path of Spiderman, only without the heroic deeds and with more wrapping twitching people into spider webs and conserving them for later consumption. Other than that, there is barely a difference – especially when it comes to their habit of walking up vertical walls and being a pest to any hapless wraith whose primary weapon only works as long as he doesn’t take any damage.

The only thing more distressing than the spider-vampires in the Silenced Cathedral are the block puzzles. Of which there are many, and they come with extra helpings of spider-vampires. Also, a few human vampire worshippers because humans are kind of dumb.

Another example for that is the Silenced Cathedral itself: called this because it was constructed by the humans as a sonic mega-weapons against the vampires, but then the vampires came and said, “This is our cathedral now,” and the humans were like, “Okay.”

The only use for the sound pipes now is for Raziel to blast himself upwards through the tower, because he can’t scale vertical walls yet.

Spoilers.

Eventually he reaches the top, where his brother Zephon is predictably lurking. In a wall. That he is part of. While laying eggs.

Considering the way vampires are created, it is to be questioned whether these eggs serve any purpose beyond being set on fire and being smashed into Zephon’s giant, mutated face. Which Raziel does, after a brief exchange in which Zephon, the giant split-faced spider merged with the wall, calls Raziel out on not being pretty anymore and somehow manages to be completely unironic about that. That’s not why Raziel decides to set him on fire, though. He also doesn’t do it because Zephon had him killed – that was Kain – or because Zephon carried out his execution – that were Turel and Dumah – but simply because Zephon is a bastard and always has been and Raziel probably has waited for an excuse to set him on fire for a very long time.

The fire is provided by the still-burning torch of the only human in the area who thought “Spider-vampires: Maybe Bad” and somehow made it all the way up the tower with a flame thrower only to be cut in half by a door within viewing distance of Zephon and his eggs. His top half still serves to kill the guy, though, which would probably have pleased him, although it’s hard to imagine how he would have felt about the skeletal wraith carrying out the deed and then eating Zephon’s soul (as he does).

Or maybe it’s not so hard to imagine. Because there is a human citadel tugged away in Nosgoth where humans are still living freely (to a given measure of freedom, considering they can’t leave their walls without being eaten) and since Raziel never murdered any of the few humans running around in the clan territories, they decided they really like him and just kind of sink to their knees and let him nibble their souls a little bit when he drops by. Which is weird, and based on a very strange idea of how souls actually work, but generally a step up from running around screaming.

In which case Raziel can still eat their souls. There is just more movement involved.

But to even get there, he needs to gain a few abilities from his brothers, kindly teaching him through soul devouring. Like Zephon now, whose soul teaches Raziel how to climb rough walls by jamming his claws into them – something he somehow couldn’t figure out how to do before.

Fortunately, there are a lot of vertical walls to scale, and while some of them lead to more block puzzles, one of them, inside the Sanctuary, leads to a back road which leads to an ancient tomb and some evidence to an ancient crime, according to Ariel and her vague-ass mumbling that only ever makes sense after Raziel found out stuff on his own. She never mentions what crime she is talking about or why Raziel should care about it, and then he arrives at the tomb and finds that it concerns him very much, because he is one of the murder victims.

The murder is not actually the crime Ariel spoke about. She’s complaining about the resurrection, and upon entering the tomb, Raziel does too. For it turns out that Raziel and his brethren were once vampire hunting Sarafan murder priests, who were brought back, without memories, by Kain to serve as his lieutenants, and while Kain obviously thought that was hilarious, Raziel does not.

They had also all been murdered, but since they lived long before Kain’s time and Kain is not a murder suspect, no one cares about that, since Kain is the only one everyone is interested in being pissed at.

Also, it happened millennia ago, so it’s not like the murderer would be still around to murder back, so who cares? Certainly not Raziel.

The Elder God leading his tentacle existence under the Lake of the Dead also has something to say about this shocking new revelation, but aside from pissing Raziel off even more than he already was, this entire trip doesn’t seem to serve any purpose, since Ariel didn’t bother to give any direction on how to go from this literal dead end, vague-ass or otherwise. It’s only after Raziel shifts back to the spectral realm for lack of anything else to do that the ground literally disappears from under him and he drops into the lair of a bat-eared Turelim-vampire who attacks him with telekinesis. Not Turel himself, though. Turel himself appears to have fucked off out of Nosgoth so hard that  his few scattered descendants are the only hint that he ever existed at all .

Raziel kills his telekinesis-spitting offspring as an unsatisfying replacement and now he has telekinesis. And uses it to enter the flooded area his middle brother Rahab has fucked off to with his children, who are super sensitive to sunlight and just die like fledgling Melchiahim if a stray ray of weak-ass sunlight hits them in the face. To make up for it they can all swim without dying and look like fish.

Raziel does not look like a fish, or much of anything really, and he also can’t swim, or touch water without dissolving back into the spectral realm, which makes the entire area rather annoying to pass through.

At the end of the annoying area waits Rahab, who is amazingly okay with Kain’s apathy about absolutely everything including Rahab’s own upcoming murder and also not very annoying to fight because he is a giant fish who dies when a stray ray of weak-ass sunlight hits him in the face and lounges in a room full of windows. And now Raziel can swim.

This conveniently opens a path to the realm of Raziel’s brother Dumah, the creator of the straw- sucking  vampires that are hanging out everywhere except for their home. There is a good reason for that, as it turns out: since Dumah was one of the brothers to throw Raziel into the Abyss, Raziel is pretty irritated with him and doesn’t even for one moment entertain an outcome to their meeting in which he does not set Dumah on fire. But Raziel is not the only one Dumah has pissed off, and then, after pissing off everyone, he and his children were too full of themselves to care about people’s murderous rage and they hung out in their fortress without a care until murderously enraged humans stormed it and murdered everyone.

Including Dumah.

This development has both good and bad consequences. The bad things are that Raziel has been cheated out of his revenge, and that Raziel now cannot eat his soul and gain anything from it, which means that he would have made the long, bothersome trip for nothing. The upsides are that Dumah has been killed by much more humiliating murderers and that his corpse is still humiliatingly on display like a skewered pig and that now Raziel doesn’t need to be chased around the empty fortress by a giant mutated super-warrior vampire with an earth-shattering footstep and a thirst for souls.

A thirst for souls? Yes, indeed. For a vampire’s body can recover even from mortal wounds if the weapon is removed and the flesh has a chance to heal, provided the soul is still around to return to it. Dumah’s soul, in all the time he’s been dead, hasn’t moved far from his corpse and is  in all seriousness taunting Raziel about being better, stronger, and generally superior to him despite being just as dead. He also brags about being better than Kain, which maybe explains why Kain never bothered to drop by and pull out the toothpicks.

Or maybe that has something to do with the fact that Kain’s fuck well has run so very, very dry.

Raziel being Raziel kindly pulls out the spears and then he gets chased around the empty fortress by a giant mutated super-warrior vampire with an earth-shattering footstep and a thirst for souls until he leads Dumah to the furnace and sets him on fire. The ability he gains from that involves telekinetic constrains and is amazingly useless except for opening the doors to the next station on the way to Kain and Vengeance: The cave of the oracle of Nosgoth, the same oracle who once sent Kain to find Vorador, to go and pointlessly kill some perverted dollmaker, and to war against the Nemesis so Kain would end up in the past and brilliantly decide to kill William the Just and give Moebius an excuse to wipe out all the vampires. Fortunately, Moebius is long since dead and no longer around to manipulate hapless people into doing something really, really stupid.

What is there, however, is an over-life sized statue of Moebius, since everyone likes to place an over-life sized statue of themselves in their living room.

Also, block puzzles.

The cave goes over into the  C hronoplast, the place where Moebius used his devices to travel through time and also spy on different eras. Raziel now has the chance to do the same, as portals in the walls show him scenes from different points of his recent and future life: His arrival in his wretched time, Kain shattering the Reaver over his head and him discovering his own tomb, but also another confrontation with Kain, Raziel using the Reaver to kill Ariel, and a non-sensical view of Raziel standing in some opening high in the wall, looking down with the Reaver attached to his arm, except the Reaver is made of fire. Weird, but probably means nothing at all.

Eventually, he finds himself in the actual time streaming chamber with Kain, and Kain is like

“That took you long enough.”

And Raziel is like

“Had to murder my brothers first, like you once murdered me. Any regrets?”

And Kain is like

“Haha, no.”

And then they fight.

As they fight, Kain gradually activates the time streaming device while they go over some grievances, like the fact that Kain recycled dead Sarafan-priests for his vampire army, or the fact that he then happily had all of them killed to further his own ambition while letting the land he claims to want to save decay all around them. Stuff like that.

Kain, or course, justifies all of his actions with the time tested excuse of being the only one smart enough to understand his motives, before throwing himself into the time stream in order to not have his soul eaten by some angry wraith. Raziel is about to blindly follow him, but the Elder Squid uses this moment to throw him a warning: Once Raziel leaves this era, he will no longer be able to aid him.

And so Raziel is like, “Sweet!” and throws himself into oblivion.

Only to be greeted by none other than Moebius the Time Streamer at the other end, who seems to have been waiting for him. As he does.

  
  


  * Not even pretending to be the end.





End file.
